After the sad passing of Natalie Zemon Davis, our long-running lecture series has been renamed in her memory. It will continue to engage with topics that engaged her scholarship and inspired generations of historians.
This year's Natalie Zemon Davis Memorial Lectures will be given by Sherene Seikaly on the topic of Historical Accompaniment as Method.
Drawing on clinical records, correspondence, reports, budgets, and diaries and using both speculation and microhistory, this series explores sovereignty, empire, and partition from the 1830s to the 1950s. Through intimate portraits of three historical actors, their friendships, illnesses, desires, ambitions, successes and failures, it offers new accounts of subjectivity and collectivity in what we know as the Middle East and North Africa. Traveling through Darfur, Khartoum, Cairo, Jerusalem, Acre, Haifa, Beirut, and Damascus, the series proposes “historical accompaniment” as a method to study how actors and places long understood as marginal shaped global history.
Sherene Seikaly is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2016). Her forthcoming book, From Baltimore to Beirut: On the Question of Palestine tells a global history of capital, slavery, and dispossession. She is the Editor of Journal of Palestine Studies, Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at UCSB, and co-editor of Jadaliyya.
The lectures will take place as follows: